Several meetings and discussions between Russians and Americans have failed to break the impasse created by the presence of 100,000 Russian soldiers on the eastern border of Ukraine. Discussions from which the Europeans were absent, the Russians preferring to dialogue directly with the Americans. Why do the Russians want to keep the Europeans out of discussions on the Ukrainian issue at all costs?
A first explanation is undoubtedly due to a desire to humiliate and further divide Europeans who are already humiliated. Vladimir Putin believes that the two countries most involved in Ukraine in the Normandy format, Germany and France, were not insistent enough with Kiev to enforce the Minsk agreements.
So there is also a desire to weaken the European Union: the more this bloc, on the same continent as Russia, is weakened, the better it will be for Moscow. By deliberately ignoring the Europeans, Putin also wants to elevate his country to the rank of a superpower that deals only on equal footing with another superpower, the United States. There is an obvious desire for prestige here.
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A will that is all the more asserted in that in fact, Putin’s Russia has certainly regained an important place on the international scene, but it remains a second-tier economic power – the 11th power on the planet, very far behind the United States and China, but also from European countries such as France, Germany or Italy. To simplify, one could say that Russia is a diplomatic giant, but an economic dwarf; unlike the European Union, an economic giant, but a political and diplomatic dwarf.
Europeans relegated to observer status by Vladimir Putin
Faced with this planned humiliation, the Europeans are clearly destabilized. Of course, they repeat that they cannot negotiate under the pressure exerted by Moscow on the eastern border of Ukraine, with its 100,000 soldiers stationed there. While affirming, to use the words of the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, that ” whatever the solution, it must go through Europe “. And the Europeans to continue, as they did this Thursday in Brest, to work on their vision of a ” european security architecture “. The goal is even, according to Emmanuel Macron, to lead at the end of March to a “ strategic compass “.
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But the reality, imposed by Vladimir Putin, is cruel: the Europeans are for the moment relegated to the rank of observers of what is happening on their own continent. This is, moreover, the whole dilemma of the European Union: with Moscow’s offensive and the lack of speaking with the same voice, it is very difficult for the 27 to show themselves to be actors, and not mere spectators, of their own safety. Vladimir Putin, who knows this very well, therefore takes full advantage of it.
Even if in the long term it is not necessarily a very good calculation – since it will be necessary in spite of everything that the Europeans, in one way or another, are present in the political settlement of the Ukrainian crisis. Without totally dismissing the specter of a confrontation if Russian troops enter Ukraine.